So common was this word that it came into other languages just as it stood. In the New Testament itself, the Syriac, Egyptian, Arabic and Ethiopic versions all keep the word paraklētos just as it stands. The Jews especially adopted the word and used it in this sense of advocate, someone to plead one’s cause. They used it as the opposite of the word accuser, and the Rabbis had this saying about what would happen in the day of God’s judgment. ‘The man who keeps one commandment of the law has got to himself one paraklētos; the man who breaks one commandment of the law has got to himself one accuser.’ They said: ‘If a man is summoned to court on a capital charge, he needs powerful paraklētoi [the plural of the word] to save him; repentance and good works are his paraklētoi in the judgment of God.’ ‘All the righteousness and mercy which an Israelite does in this world are great peace and great paraklētoi between him and his father in heaven.’ They said that the sin offering is a person’s paraklētos before God.
So, the word came into the Christian vocabulary. In the days of the persecutions and the martyrs, a Christian called Vettius Epagathos ably pleaded the case of those who were accused of being Christians. ‘He was an advocate [paraklētos] for the Christians, for he had the Advocate within himself, even the Spirit’ (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, 5:1). The Letter of Barnabas (20) speaks of evil men who are the advocates of the wealthy and the unjust judges of the poor. The writer of 2 Clement asks: ‘Who shall be your paraklētos if it be not clear that your works are righteous and holy?’ (2 Clement 6:9).
A paraklētos has been defined as ‘one who lends his presence to his friends’. More than once in the New Testament, there is this great conception of Jesus as the friend and the defender of men and women. In a military court-martial, the officer who defends the soldier under accusation is called the prisoner’s friend. Jesus is our friend. Paul writes of that Christ who is at the right hand of God and ‘who intercedes for us’ (Romans 8:34). The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews speaks of Jesus Christ as the one who ‘always lives to make intercession’ (Hebrews 7:25); and he also speaks of him as appearing ‘in the presence of God on our behalf’ (Hebrews 9:24).
The tremendous thing about Jesus is that he has never lost his interest in, or his love for, men and women. We are not to think of him as having gone through his life upon the earth and his death upon the cross, and then being finished with us. He still bears his concern for us upon his heart; he still pleads for us; Jesus Christ is the prisoner’s friend for all.
JESUS CHRIST THE ATONING SACRIFICE
1 John 2:1–2 (contd)
JOHN goes on to say that Jesus is, as the Authorized Version has it, the propitiation for our sins. The word is hilasmos. This is a more difficult picture for us to grasp fully. The picture of the advocate is universal, for we all have experience of a friend coming to our aid; but the picture in propitiation is less familiar. It comes from sacrifice; and, to understand it, we must explore the basic ideas behind it.
The great aim of all religion is fellowship with God, to know him as friend and to enter with joy, and not fear, into his presence. It therefore follows that the supreme problem of religion is sin, for it is sin that interrupts fellowship with God. It is to meet that problem that all sacrifice arises. By sacrifice, fellowship with God is restored. So, the Jews offered – night and morning – the sin offering in the Temple. That was the offering, not for any particular sin but for all people as sinners; and, as long as the Temple lasted, it was made to God in the morning and in the evening. The Jews also offered their trespass offerings to God; these were the offerings for particular sins. The Jews had their Day of Atonement, whose ritual was designed to atone for all sins, known and unknown. It is with that background that we must approach this picture of propitiation.
As we have said, the Greek word for propitiation is hilasmos; and the corresponding verb is hilaskesthai. This verb has three meanings. (1) When it is used with a person as the subject, it means to placate or to pacify someone who has been injured or offended, and especially to placate a god. It is to bring a sacrifice or to perform a ritual whereby a god, offended by sin, is pacified. (2) If the subject is God, the verb means to forgive, for then the meaning is that God himself provides the means whereby the lost relationship between him and the people concerned is restored. (3) The third meaning is allied with the first. The verb often means to perform some deed by which the taint of guilt is removed. People sin; at once they become tainted by sin; something is needed which, to use the scholar C. H. Dodd’s metaphor, will disinfect them from that contamination and enable them once again to enter into the presence of God. In that sense, hilaskesthai means not to propitiate but to expiate – not so much to pacify God as to disinfect from the taint of sin and by that means make people once again fit to enter into fellowship with God.
When John says that Jesus is the hilasmos for our sins, he is, we think, bringing all these different meanings together into one. Jesus is the person through whom guilt for past sin and defilement from present sin are removed. The great basic truth behind this word is that it is through Jesus Christ that our fellowship with God is first restored and then maintained.
We note one other thing. As John sees it, this work of Jesus was carried out not only for us but for the whole world. There is in the New Testament a strong line of thought in which the universality of the salvation of God is stressed. God so loved the world that he sent his Son (John 3:16). Jesus is confident that, if he is lifted up, he will draw all people to him (John 12:32). God desires everyone to be saved (1 Timothy 2:4). It would indeed be a bold person who would set limits to the grace and love of God or to the effectiveness of the work and sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Truly, as F. W. Faber’s hymn has it, ‘the love of God is broader than the measures of man’s mind’; and in the New Testament itself there are hints of a salvation whose arms are as wide as the world.
THE TRUE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD
1 John 2:3–6
And it is by this that we know that we have come to know him – if we keep his commandments. He who says: ‘I have come to know him’ and who does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in such a man. The love of God is truly perfected in any man who keeps his word. This is the way in which we know that we are in him. He who claims that he abides in him ought himself to live the same kind of life as he lived.
THIS passage deals in phrases and thoughts which were very familiar in the ancient world. People talked a good deal about knowing God and about being in God. It is important that we should see where the differences lay between the Gentile world in all its greatness and Judaism and Christianity. To know God, to abide in God and to have fellowship with God has always been the quest of the human spirit, for St Augustine was right when he said that God had made us for himself and that our hearts were restless until they found their rest in him. We may say that, in the ancient world, there were three lines of thought in regard to knowing God.
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